Solving the violin mystery: was this $20,000,000 violin a fake?

The "Messiah Violin" was the most expensive violin in the world. But it had been called a fake. The famous tree detective, Dr. Henri Grissino-Mayer, was on the case.

The violin was worth $20 million because the master instrument-maker Antonio Stradivari crafted the instrument more than 200 years ago. Or did he?

A scientist who studied violins and another scientist who studied tree rings claimed that Stradivari did not make the violin. It was not possible, they said, because the last ring in the violin's wood had grown in 1738. That was the year after Stradivari died. Could Dr. Henri find the truth ... also by using tree rings?

One new ring grows in a tree trunk every year. When a tree is cut into boards, the dark and light lines of the rings show in the surface of each board as the grain of the wood. The Messiah Violin is covered with these lines. Like fingerprints, patterns made by these lines offer important clues.

The Detectives Arrive

Dr. Henri flew to England with a duffle bag containing 100 pounds of equipment. He had a microscope, measuring tools, and a laptop computer. The computer held measurements of tree rings from hundreds of trees in the Alps mountains. That is where Stradivari got the wood to make his violins. The measurements would be the key to solving the case.

Dr. Henri and two other tree-ring scientists arrived at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, where the Messiah Violin is kept in a special glass case. The case would be opened for only the fourth time in a hundred years.

"The museum was closed down for the night," Dr. Henri said. "There was added security all around. We had to put on white gloves, and the curator opened the case. That was an exciting moment."

Studying the Violin

The curator set the brilliantly glowing reddish-orange instrument on velvet and removed the strings so that all the tree rings on top could be seen. Then he handed the violin to Dr. Henri.

"I was really careful with the violin," Dr. Henri said. "That was strange, holding something worth twenty million dollars. We put it underneath the microscope on a measuring system, and we measured the tree rings."

Later, he compared those measurements to those of tree rings in other instruments made by Stradivari.

Some rings were narrow because the weather had been dry or cold during the years they grew. Other rings were wide because the weather during those years had been sunny with a lot of rain. The pattern made by wide and narrow rings--a pattern that looks a lot like a fingerprint--was important.

The Mystery ... Solved!

Dr. Henri was ready to solve the mystery. He compared the tree-ring patterns the way other detectives compare fingerprints. But instead of identifying a person, he wanted to identify a period of time.

He knew that during any year, all of the trees from the same area grew about the same amount. The pattern of wide and narrow rings on the violin matched the pattern of measurements from other trees from the Alps for the years 1577 to 1687. That one-of-a-kind pattern showed that the rings in the violin grew during those years. The experts claiming that the violin could not have been made by Stradivari were proved wrong.

"It was definitely not a fake," Dr. Henri said. "We were able to prove that."

Where Disaster Makes Its Mark

Dr. Henri does a lot of detective work using tree rings. Here are examples.

* Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions of long ago left their signatures in tree rings. The damage means the trees grew less and now have narrower rings. Many volcanoes throw gases, ash, and other material into the air. That material can hang in the atmosphere, blocking out sunlight. The weather gets cold and leaves a frost ring in the trees.

* Tree rings can shed new light on old forest fires. Fires scar trees, leaving telltale wounds in the rings. Those clues tell scientists when and where big fires occurred in the past.

* Water pollution and air pollution leave their marks in tree rings. Each year, the tree rings become narrower and narrower. Finally, the pollution can even kill the tree.